On the Drifters, Deep Purple and the Griddle: A mall story

Here’s all you need to know about my social life in high school:

While other kids were dating, going to movies and dances, my closest friends and I were testing the durability of dinner rolls.

Please allow me to explain … I promise it’ll make sense.

On Aug. 13, 1964, the Northland Mall opened in Columbus. More than 50,000 people took the opportunity to experience what would become an American cultural and commercial phenomenon.

Shopping centers were commonplace, but a shopping mall offered another level of consumer nirvana, one that featured dozens of stores under the same roof, a self-contained retail universe replete with fountains, atria, piped-in music, frond-laden ferns and food.

What was unique was the novel notion to have each wing of the development dead-end into a well-known franchise, something with national — or at least regional — cachet. These Fortune 500 destinations soon became known as “anchor stores,” and they were the mall’s lifeblood, keeping customers walking past (and often into) other startup businesses on their way to the big-league venues.

In what can only be described as old-fashioned bad timing, my family moved from the capital city to a small town just weeks after Northland’s debut, though we were there long enough for me to buy my first-ever 45-rpm single, titled “Under the Boardwalk.”

But like the Drifters, we were on our way, heading for a new life.

Faithful readers will recall my mother, a born-and-bred big-city girl, never really adjusted to the placid, Mayberry-paced existence that would be her lot in life for the next 16 years or so.

But then, in 1969, we got our own mall, just down the road.

Suddenly, our little town didn’t seem like such an isolated backwater, a tiny dot on the map where factory whistles wailed twice a day, where churches were predominantly Protestant, where Republicans ran pretty much everything, where there were three or four stoplights scattered along the entire length of the main drag.

We had a downtown movie theater, a public library, a general store, a grain elevator and a smattering of horse-drawn buggies, an anachronistic nod to a past that wasn’t exactly all that past. There were nice parks, a Catholic grade school, a YMCA, several taverns and more churches than anyone had any reasonable right to expect.

The town was proud of its laid-back rhythm and, in a stroke of PR genius, billed itself as “The Home of the 5 o’clock Rush Minute.”

There was a local radio station that announced school closings due to overnight snowfall and carried every Cleveland Indians game, and we got three stations on our black-and-white TV set.

We didn’t get back to the big city very often and, over weeks and months and years, eventually came to feel as if we belonged. Shoes and shirts and skirts and socks were sold, you could get an ice cream sundae or a banana split, the college enabled Dad to earn a comfortable living, and our next-door neighbor sold cars, which meant every three years, we got a brand-new Ford station wagon.

By the time I’d gotten my driver’s license, I had found a group of friends that shared a fondness for music and playing Ping-Pong, a somewhat unorthodox combination that worked well for us. We also had a tendency to stretch the limits of the law, but because our IQs made us smart and careful, we stayed out of trouble … mostly.

The one thing that eluded us as we grew up was success with the girls, a trait that would later in life earn us the “sex nerd” label.

Oh, there were infrequent exceptions, especially when high school rules dictated this-or-the-other dance would be a ladies-choice affair, but on the whole, we were standoffish in a wallflower way.

Which explains why, most Saturday nights, you could find us at the mall, haunting the record store, perhaps purchasing a hot soft pretzel, checking out the bookseller and people-watching, happy to have a boys night, knowing we had Sunday to breeze through our homework, confident that delaying it didn’t mean ignoring it.

Which brings us back to studying the durability of dinner rolls.

Adjacent to the mall was a restaurant that was more big-city than the eateries in our town, where “Fill your middle at the Griddle” was a catchphrase that had amused — and lured — folks for years.

The Ponderosa offered steak dinners and a buffet for like $5, and we stopped there often after quitting the mall. Somehow, one of us took it in his head to see how much stress one of their dinner rolls could withstand, which is why I remember driving Dad’s Country Squire back and forth over it, trying to flatten the stubborn roll. Even after driving back to town with it skewered on the radio antenna, exposing it to the elements, it retained its vital essence.

Someone suggested lashing it to an M-80 rocket, but we refrained, opting instead to toast its resilience, lifting our mugs: “To the roll!”

Then I popped Deep Purple into the cassette player, and we played endless games of Ping-Pong, making the garage feel like a hangout.

I still try to drive by that house every week, remembering so much of a life that’s long gone, hearing “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water” cranked again, reminding me of a time when malls weren’t obsolete but something young and cool, just like we were.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where it’s OK to go back home again … he hopes.